First opened Wednesday, July 26, 2006
認める
みとめる
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
to recognize, to notice; to approve
Mitomeru is thought to be 見 (mi, “seeing”) plus 留める (tomeru, “to hold, to keep”): “to keep one's vision on”.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: the only split Wiktionary offers is hedged (see the marked line below), and it doesn't spell the word — it describes where the sound may come from — so showing it as the word's parts would be a guess.
Written with 認
In a sentence
要求は認められた。
The request was granted.
彼は負けを認めた。
He admitted himself defeated.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- Hedged“Thought to be from 見(み) (mi, “seeing, looking”, 連(れん)用(よう)形(けい) (ren'yōkei, “stem or continuative form”) of the verb 見(み)る (miru, “to see, to look”)) + 留(と)める (tomeru, “to hold, to keep, to remain”), possibly with semantics like “to keep one's vision on” → “to recognize, to acknowledge, to observe”.”
Source: Wiktionary: 認める (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.